Websites help families preserve histories

Saturday

Mar 29, 2014 at 12:01 AMMar 29, 2014 at 8:51 AM

Until recently, Jessie Leiken thought she knew about the major adventures of her mother's life: a hot-air balloon ride in Egypt, a snowshoeing excursion in Montana, a camel-meat meal in Morocco. Then, several weeks ago, an email message from the mother of the 27-year-old New York union organizer landed in her inbox. Nancy Mills, 64, told an entirely new tale.

Until recently, Jessie Leiken thought she knew about the major adventures of her mother’s life: a hot-air balloon ride in Egypt, a snowshoeing excursion in Montana, a camel-meat meal in Morocco.

Then, several weeks ago, an email message from the mother of the 27-year-old New York union organizer landed in her inbox.

Nancy Mills, 64, told an entirely new tale:

I do want to share one particular adventure that you may not know about — the one Antioch College demanded of all students who were planning to go abroad for part of their education. As I recall it, they gave us each $10 (or thereabouts) and drove us to a small, very small town in rural Ohio and dropped us off on the side of the road and told us they would pick us up at the same place 48 hours later.

The Mills family has been receiving such messages — ones containing nuggets of her past, as well as memories of her parents’ and grandparents’ lives — a few times a month for almost a year.

That was when Leiken, a New York resident, signed up her mother for the service StoryWorth.

StoryWorth provides a selection of weekly questions, chosen by Leiken, for her mother to answer. It then emails the questions to Mills, and when she replies, her answers go to her family and are stored on a website, where they can read them privately.

StoryWorth, founded in late 2012, is among a handful of new companies focused on enabling people to collect their family histories.

Nick Baum, a San Francisco-based software engineer and product manager, left his job at Google in 2011 to pursue the entrepreneurial path. The StoryWorth idea began with a simple experiment: Baum built a service called Dear Robot that sent a daily text message to his smartphone asking how his day was going. His replies created what became a mini-diary.

“It was a very easy way to write a little bit every day,” said Baum, 31.

The writing exercise reminded him of how, several years earlier, he had bought a book filled with questions about family history and childhood memories, with spaces for written responses. He had given it to his parents in the hope that they would use it to write stories he could share with his future children.

Baum was especially curious to know more about his father, Axel Baum, 83, who was a naval officer before becoming an international lawyer.

His parents, though, never wrote in the book.

He wondered whether sending them weekly queries by email instead, similar to the Dear Robot experiment, would be more effective.

He tried it, asking, for example, about their earliest memories in life and their favorite childhood books.

Breaking down the process in this way prompted his parents to start writing — just as it did for Mills.

Answering specific questions, Mills said, is doable.

“You’re not faced with thinking about your whole life or even what story you want to tell,” she said. “It’s like you’re having a conversation.”

She also found that the questions can penetrate deeper into the past than a regular chat might.

“It stimulates a part of your brain and memory that for me hadn’t been stimulated any other way before.”

The recent StoryWorth question about her adventures was particularly effective at conjuring up the past. Not even her husband knew of her survivalist stint near Yellow Springs, Ohio.

We were to survive for those 48 hours — finding shelter, food, friends, the works. Without a cellphone, of course. (This was in 1968!) I don’t actually remember much of those 48 hours except that I hid out in a barn the first night rather than talk to anyone and then managed to knock on some doors the next day so got fed and was able to wash my face (and I think had a real bed for the night).

Mills’ use of StoryWorth — replying by email to weekly writing prompts — is the most common. But because StoryWorth’s users range in age from their teens to their 90s and have varying experience with technology, Baum has kept the site simple and has devised alternate ways for them to record their stories.

Some subscribers take advantage of StoryWorth’s audio-recording option, whereby they can speak their reminiscences as if they’re leaving a voice mail. The stories are then saved as MP3 files.

One user in her late 80s doesn’t have a computer, so she receives her questions via a stand-alone printer. Each week, she writes her memories by hand and sends them via regular mail to her grandson, who reads and saves them.

Widespread interest in recording family stories can partly be traced to the founding in 2003 of the Story Corps project, a nonprofit operation that stations mobile recording booths throughout the country for the public to use.

The practice has also received a lift from a renewed interest in family heritage spurred by the digitization of records, including birth and death certificates, and the increased accessibility of DNA testing, which provides ethnic heritage information.

StoryWorth subscribers have generated more than 10,000 stories.

The company charges an annual fee of $49, which covers up to six family members and includes an unlimited amount of data storage.

Users can also upload their own audio files and photos.

Baum declined to disclose the company’s revenue, but he said it was already profitable.

The new site Memloom allows its users to upload video, audio, photos and their own written stories.

“We think storytelling is a burgeoning area,” said Alyssa R. Martina, co-founder and CEO of Memloom.

“We all have stories we want to tell.”

Leiken said the new way of communicating with her mother “has helped me to know her better and understand the context of her life.”

Mills credited StoryWorth with strengthening her connections with her family, and, as her 48-hour venture in rural Ohio reveals, it has helped her glean insights into her own life:

I do remember that it was terrifying and just the right thing to do to make one feel first overwhelmed and then confident. Bravo Antioch. I have fallen back on my survival of that weekend many a time when I was on the brink of despair of “making it” through any of a number of adventures since then.

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